There are some people who seem indestructible. Obviously it's not true: we are all flesh and blood after all and at the end of the day all organic matter decays at a certain point. But there are some personalities and some people that are so present that you can never imagine them not being around anymore. Luna was one such person.

She was a combination of Tony Soprano and Genghis Khan. She was fiercely protective of her family with an emphasis on fierce. She was stubborn to a fault, but stubbornly loyal to her children and to her husband, even 20 years after his death. Family was everything to her - literally. You couldn't be at a family gathering with her and not be told "you are sitting here with The Family." "The Family" in caps in that sentence. It was never "with us." It was with "The Family," and it carried with it a weight and a gravitas for her that nothing else could.

She was 4 foot 10 on a good day, if she wasn't 7 feet tall. She was such a dominant figure that her diminutive stature almost made her seem larger. The room revolved around her. She had a gravitational pull; she was the puppeteer of the family and was the glue that kept everybody together. Her four children could fight and scream at each other but if she insisted they get along they would get along or they would hear from her.

She was strikingly beautiful. A curly, blonde-haired, blue-eyed lady growing up in Cairo wasn't a common sight; that she wore it well was even rarer. The pictures of her as a young woman in her twenties show a confident, beautiful woman who - let's face it - knew she was beautiful. And smart. She wasn't college educated but she was smart and she knew it and wouldn't let you forget it. And believe me: if she gave you advice and you didn't take it? Hoo boy. You'd hear from her. But you'd almost always listen because she would talk to you and talk to you and talk to you and made sure you knew she was right.

Because she was always right. Even when she was wrong, she was right. And she was ahead of her time in so many ways. Yes, she could do no wrong and her husband was her king, but she was the real head of the household. She just let him think he was. But when they needed more money after they fled Egypt in the early 1950s and moved to Israel, she didn't ask - she told him: I'm going to work. And she did. She worked until she was nearly 80 as a tailor and dressmaker.

Her proud, fierce fearlessness was part of her stubborn nature. It was part of her "I'm never wrong" attitude. When you're usually right and when you're confident and self assured you have nothing to fear. That was the essence of Luna. Even on her last day, a few hours before she would breathe her last, she was joking around on her hospital bed. Telling my father how much money she saved him by getting sick when he was visiting Israel anyway, so he didn't have to spend money on long distance telephone calls. A few days earlier, looking at 3 of her grandsons around her hospital bed and saying with a half smirk, "I love you, but... you know there's something special about your own children. You can always return grandchildren, but you can never replicate the bond that you have with your kids." I asked, jokingly, if we should just leave the room then, and she laughed.

Everyone called her Mami (pronounced: Mommy). It came from the French - maman - because she was everyone's mother, even to those who she wasn't related to (and she was fluent in French, Arabic and Hebrew). She was a woman who, at 92, was still full of life. I remember, in her late 80s, she took a 5 hour bus-ride with her friends from her home in the Tel Aviv area to Taba, Egypt to go gamble in the casinos there. She would have continued going but it became increasingly hard for her to walk and the bus ride was so uncomfortable for her that she couldn't. And at the end of the ride was a nearly 1 kilometer walk across the border. And she could have been wheeled across in a wheelchair, but she was much too proud, too fierce, to let anyone ever see her weakness. But she'd continue shopping on her own for years after that, until even that became difficult.

She left this world suddenly - as suddenly as one does at 92, I suppose. She entered the hospital last Saturday with some chest-pain. Things got better, then worse. But she was coherent, and laughing until Wednesday night. And then on Thursday at 9:03AM this world couldn't contain her personality anymore.

If there is something beyond, then I'm sure she is talking her husband's ear off right now, telling him how wrong he was for never buying an apartment in Tel Aviv, telling him about his 33 great-grandchildren that she was lucky enough to see. And I'm sure she's forcing everyone else to sit around her table, drawing them close and never letting go.

I'm so sorry to hear about your loss, Mac. It sounds like she was someone really worth knowing, and that she'll be missed. I'm glad you had the time with her that you did... my condolences.

The most important lesson I've learned over this past year, is not to let anyone make you cruel. No matter how badly you want to give the world a taste of it's own bitter medicine, it is never worth losing yourself.